Mental health campaigner and OBE recipient Ruby Wax recently told The Times: "When people say, 'Should you tell them at work?', I say: 'Are you crazy?' You have to lie. If you have someone who is physically ill, they can't fire you. They can't fire you for mental health problems but they'll say it's for another reason. Just say you have emphysema."

The minds of the Irish people have become inflamed by fiery debate on the issue of Marriage Equality. In two weeks, our country takes to the polls to vote on Marriage Equality, and should it pass, could make not only Irish history, but world history, by being the first country to legally enact it by popular vote.

It isn't just mental illness that we hide in our 'I am fines' it is also our physical illness, our money worries, family problems, loss and loneliness-the list is endless. The majority of us bottle it up in this fast-paced society.

I've never had clinical depression, but I've experienced sadness so deep and engulfing it stole me for a while. I've felt desperately hopeless at times and on others frighteningly disengaged. I don't know how it was that I found my way through. I just did.

We know pictures can be just as damaging as words when it comes to mental health problems in the media. Far too often, we have seen the notorious 'headclutcher' - the solitary person, with head in hands, in the stock shots that are used over and over again.

Women and girls face discrimination due to gender, potential disabilities and stigma - a triple jeopardy. According to UNDP, girls and women affected by leprosy make up some of the world's poorest and most marginalised groups, disproportionately affected by poverty, illiteracy and lack of education which act as barriers to seeking health treatment. Women and girls with leprosy and those affected by other neglected tropical diseases have the right to health care and the barriers to that stop this must be addressed.

Since stigma is still an issue even in today's society, we should be teaching ALL children to understand a range of emotions including mental illness from a young age. Being aware that feeling sad or low or anxious is nothing to feel ashamed of could help young people to open up, and prevent them developing into something more serious in later years.

To explain mine better would be to tell her that since she told me as I sat down, that they'd had a woman in earlier that day that had been 'up all night with a dodgy tummy', I could literally FEEL the germs on my chair.

By posting pictures of emaciated people to raise awareness, it is just reinforcing that stereotype so that the general public still have the idea that to be unwell the sufferer must be very thin and it makes sufferers feel that unless they look like that photo then they are not unwell enough to seek help.

Princess Kate is entirely correct, there is still a social stigma surrounding mental health and that prevents people from seeking and receiving the help they need. Yet suggesting mental health issues always have a dramatic cause feeds into that stigma.

For me depression and anxiety happened to other people, my life was all rainbows and fairy cakes. I'd gone to university in September 2009 and was, it seemed, managing. I'd adjusted well, made friends and everything was exciting.

Up until that day when I was admitted to hospital I thought this was all 'normal', I thought this was how life worked. Mental illnesses weren't something that happened to 'normal' people, and they most certainly weren't something to be spoken about.

Society breeds stigma, but by keeping these stories behind closed doors, sometimes so do we. Even if we have the best intentions. We perpetuate it by thinking these normal, more-common-place-than-we-realise, stories of illness such as addiction, have to be secrets. Maybe they don't.

Imagine being told with utter conviction from a stranger that what you had - whether it's an illness, the ability to recite the seven times table, or an actual living entity like a cat in your arms - wasn't actually real, and all because they once read an uninformed piece about it in a tabloid paper.

For the most part, the international staff at the Red Cross treatment centre have years of experience behind them. But even so, you cannot neglect the psychological impact of dealing with death on a daily basis.

These facts are awful when you think of the effects such as drinking is a depressant and has been known to be used as a crutch in the mental illness depression or for example drugs such as cannabis make you 30% more likely to develop the debilitating illness of schizophrenia.

However this is not just about me. It's not just about last week. It's not just about the companies I used. It is about civil and human rights. It is about living in 2015 and seeing disabled people go through these events daily.

With so much talk in the news recently about freedom of speech, it really got me thinking. If everyone should be entitled to free speech why do I get so wound up if someone calls me mental? Or bat sh*t crazy? Or a head case?

If we want to challenge HIV stigma we need to tackle the roots of the problem. We need to press for LGBT rights in countries who have introduced discriminatory legislation and in those such as Uganda and Zimbabwe where homosexuality is illegal.